Bench ®

Proxy-voting is one of the largest unsolved problems of the American financial system.

Giving an agent a wallet or account isn't the hard part. Creating a robust, governed way to trust it is. Today Catena announces product access, OCC news, and Series A investment from wonderful partners: catena.com/blog/banking-g…

"I think [AI agents] may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets." @psneville, cofounder of @catena_labs, makes the case for an agent-native internet built on stablecoin rails: "Once we have stablecoins and we have the ability to represent dollars on internet rails, what kind of new opportunities does that unlock? At the same time we were contemplating that, you could see clearly the web, the internet itself, is going agent-native." "As AI actors become economic participants, they will ultimately be the primary dominant economic participants in the world for all kinds of activities, payments, and otherwise." "Flash forward in a few years, I think they may be the only actors that we trust with our assets and the only actors that are capable of generating meaningful return on our assets."

Owing to a variety of historical reasons (including, but not only, protectionist lobbying), the U.S. is the only G7 country where regulated payments companies can’t directly access government-run settlement rails. Yesterday's EO from the White House calls for that to change. This is a very good idea. If regulated payments companies can integrate directly with the Fed, there will be less unnecessary coupling between "fractional reserve banking/leverage/maturity transformation" and "quotidian payments activity", thereby reducing overall systemic risk in the financial system. This would also establish the preconditions for more competition, more innovation, and lower fees. whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…

If you're running agents that touch money, or are about to, come build with us. Private Access is open at catena.com

Sorry to hear. Our @privy_io experience has been exemplary. @segall_max and team have been there step by step on our journey.

Always bet on @psneville and @mattyven . Congrats to the best in the game.

1/ Some thoughts on yesterday’s EO instructing the Fed to expand access to Fed accounts and services to nonbank fintech firms. 

Overall, I’m bullish.  But first: this is not a summary — Claude or ChatGPT can do that for you. Instead, I will try to explain the context behind how Fed staff thinks about these kinds of issues as a recovering central banker.

Cambridge woefully undervalued. Better talent. Better lifestyle. Better schools. AWFUL weather.

@RepKeithAmmon Let's talk. Stablecoins can do that for .00001 fee. Better for NH consumers.

NH E-ZPass without a transponder is $1 for the toll and $4 for the processing fee, for every transit through a toll booth. Say, what?

"agentic commerce is so dry" - @pmarca

billions of agents, moving trillions of dollars of value on @base

The entire focus of @radiustech_xyz is solving for this problem.

Good convo with @eastdakota just now. He said our size is not size. Cloudflare needs a chain that can do 100m TPS for AI micropayments at scale. Crypto has nothing close to this today. Episode drops next Monday.

Darrell Duffie of Stanford is famous for being the world’s foremost scholar of financial market plumbing. Few will know that he was also a director of The Narrow Bank (TNB), the bank the Fed quietly strangled for the crime of being too safe. In this episode we cover: Why did TNB die? What are the parallels to the state of stablecoins today, if any? Do stablecoins actually threaten bank deposits? What does a Treasury security purpose-built for on-chain settlement look like? What tokenized assets should serve as the backbone of financial system of the future? Darrell’s Brookings paper with Don Wilson and TNB’s regulatory comment letter on Regulation D are both worth reading alongside this episode. • 00:00 – Intro • 01:07 – The Bank That Couldn’t Fail • 03:53 – Will Stablecoins Kill Lending? • 07:54 – Private Credit’s Run Problem • 11:14 – Too Safe to Exist • 18:31 – Why USDC Can’t Run Wall Street • 25:21 – The Narrow Bank Returns • 28:22 – If Duffie Ran Global Finance • 31:25 – The Stablecoin Sandwich Problem • 34:20 – The End of CLS? • 40:31 – Nubank vs. JPMorgan Brought to you by Codex, the stablecoin foreign exchange specialist.

To say it was an honor to work under Jay's leadership in the Federal Reserve System is an understatement. History will judge him amongst the best.

Standards should create value, not capture it. @programmer explains that by remaining open and neutral, x402 fosters a competitive level playing field that allows companies to compete to build better services.

@kleffew94 @AWS I remember that room from the launch!

I had a great time presenting to the crowd at @AWS Startup Connect in SF today! We covered the recent x402 launch enabling AWS AgentCore Bedrock Payments. Learn more here: docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentc…

@commonwarexyz never ceases to impress. Well done @_patrickogrady !

Simon Johnson and I are hiring a postdoc at MIT to research the history, social implications, and future of technology. The job description and application link are available here: shapingwork.mit.edu/careers/james-…